title: Electronic Support for Public Health: validated case finding and reporting for notifiable diseases using electronic medical data.
abstract: Health care providers are legally obliged to report cases of specified diseases to public health authorities, but existing manual, provider-initiated reporting systems generally result in incomplete, error-prone, and tardy information flow. Automated laboratory-based reports are more likely accurate and timely, but lack clinical information and treatment details. Here, we describe the Electronic Support for Public Health (ESP) application, a robust, automated, secure, portable public health detection and messaging system for cases of notifiable diseases. The ESP application applies disease specific logic to any complete source of electronic medical data in a fully automated process, and supports an optional case management workflow system for case notification control. All relevant clinical, laboratory and demographic details are securely transferred to the local health authority as an HL7 message. The ESP application has operated continuously in production mode since January 2007, applying rigorously validated case identification logic to ambulatory EMR data from more than 600,000 patients. Source code for this highly interoperable application is freely available under an approved open-source license at http://esphealth.org.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Ross
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lazarus
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Klompas
authors.forename: Francis X
authors.initials: FX
authors.lastname: Campion
authors.forename: Scott J N
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: McNabb
authors.forename: Xuanlin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hou
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Daniel
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Haney
authors.forename: Alfred
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: DeMaria
authors.forename: Leslie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lenert
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Platt
mesh_terms: D003141:Communicable Diseases; D003199:Computer Systems; D018563:Disease Notification / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011635:Public Health Administration; D040442:Public Health Informatics; D014481:United States